Glenn Beck speaks at the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC last year. (Getty Images)

(Newser)
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Glenn Beck is considering following in Oprah Winfrey's footsteps and starting his own channel, sources tell the New York Times. Beck's contract at Fox is up at the end of the year. With the network rumored to be considering dropping him, Beck is looking into taking over all or part of a cable channel, or expanding his subscription Internet video service, according to the sources, who say Beck has been mulling the move for more than a year.

Beck has been shunned by advertisers on Fox so a Glenn Beck channel may be a risky venture—although he is likely to bring a sizable audience with him if he leaves the network. Insiders say Beck doesn't plan to directly compete with Fox, but aims to extract more value from loyal fans. Beck declined to discuss his future plans, but issued a statement praising Fox and saying: "I have no intention whatsoever of doing the show I am doing now on Fox anywhere else."

The Peek-a-Boo World Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering gray light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange. There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. Neil Postman | Amusing Ourselves to Death